[liberationtech] Web3 is BS

[bo0od]

I dont know much about web3, But i would like to add an authentic 
project has a good work to the list you mentioned called namecoin check 
it out:

https://www.namecoin.org/

Yosem Companys:
> I found this to be an interesting post, especially in the context of
> Liberationtech's having supported the development of Diaspora, one of the
> most successful federated social networking sites.
> 
> Elon Musk is right. Web3 is BS.
> By Maciej Baron
> Jan 9 2022
> <https://maciekbaron.medium.com/elon-musk-is-right-web3-is-bs-1cdafc3f96f7>
> 
> To put it mildly, I am not Elon’s biggest fan. He’s an ignorant,
> narcissistic, reckless, self-indulgent buffoon who treats his employees
> like crap, and who just happens to be amazing at marketing himself, which
> helped him become a billionaire, despite running unprofitable companies.
> 
> Musk however, recently tweeted something that I wholeheartedly agree with:
> “Web3 sounds like bs”.
> 
> Web3 is an idea, which even Bloomberg admitted is a bit hazy, which
> suggests we can achieve a decentralised World Wide Web using blockchains.
> The proponents of this concept like to talk about how Web 2.0 became
> centralised and controlled by big corporations, and how blockchains, crypto
> and NFTs can help “give the power back to the people”.
> 
> This all sounds wonderful and looks good on paper, but in reality, it’s
> simply bullshit.
> 
> WebBs
> 
> Web3 is bullshit on several different levels, but most importantly, it
> confuses a political and power-relationship problem with a technological
> one. According to Web3 believers, blockchain is the technology that can
> finally allow the Web to go back to its decentralised roots. The truth is,
> blockchains are not only useless in achieving that, we already have the
> technology to do that.
> 
> ActivityPub is a protocol that has been available for years, and which
> inspired the creation of fairly successful decentralised, federated social
> networks such as Mastodon. Any community can create their own ActivityPub
> instance which is controlled by them — even a single user can create their
> own server instance if they want to, and federate with other instances.
> It’s a beautiful architecture that allows people to control who has access
> to their feeds, and what sort of feeds they are exposed to.
> 
> So why haven’t we seen a mass exodus of people from Twitter and Facebook to
> Mastodon, or similar platforms? The technology is there, the platform is
> there — all it takes is to register and switch.
> 
> The reason for this is that platforms like Twitter have already achieved
> enormous power and influence, and a large user base that simply stays where
> most of the people they follow are. There are plenty of stories of people
> switching over to Mastodon, only to return to Twitter shortly after,
> because that’s “where all the action is”. Companies like Twitter spend
> millions on “customer retention”; they help big brands improve their
> presence online and give users plenty of reasons to stay and stick to
> Twitter.
> 
> The monopolistic nature of the biggest social media platforms is also
> beneficial to other companies, which can streamline their advertising and
> marketing campaigns — this benefits the wider capitalist system. The
> monopoly of the big players is a natural result of the system we have in
> place.
> 
> The Web3 thinking is based on the naive technocratic assumption that
> technology and “smart ideas” can solve most of our societal problems. Its
> naivety also expands to the belief that free-market capitalism is the
> solution to the encroachment of monopolies, and not the system that is in
> fact actively creating and enlarging them.
> 
> There isn’t a technology that will solve this, and this isn’t happening
> because of a lack of a certain technology. We already have tools to create
> a decentralised web, and blockchains aren’t even the right technology to
> begin with.
> 
> Blockchains, NFTs and crypto-bullshit
> 
> A blockchain is a form of a digital ledger, which consists of records
> called blocks. Such a database is managed autonomously using a peer-to-peer
> network, meaning there is no main, centralised machine controlling the
> whole infrastructure. Instead everything is controlled collectively by all
> the nodes connected to the network.
> 
> The main purpose of a blockchain, and really the only reason it can be made
> useful, is to record transactions. It is admittedly a fairly clever way of
> avoiding the double spending problem — when a digital token is spent twice
> (or multiple times), that is, transferred to multiple destinations at once.
> This is also why, so far, the only major use of blockchains is for digital
> currency, and artificially scarce digital assets (Non-Fungible Tokens —
> NFTs).
> 
> Some people have suggested that NFTs could be used for recording things
> like deeds and property titles, but it makes little sense to use
> blockchains for recording anything physical or anything that requires
> off-chain validation, authorisation, authentication or confirmation — even
> if we consider the use of oracles. Blockchains only make sense in a
> digital-only world, and only for transactional data — and so far nobody
> came up with a compelling dapp idea (decentralized application) that is not
> tied to cryptocurrency in any way.
> 
> This is why when some Web3 evangelists talk about how social media is
> centralised and how blockchains can help, you know they’re bullshitting you.
> 
> Social media posts are not transactional data. You may have “likes” that
> you can give to posts, but the double spending problem is not relevant
> here, because you have an unrestricted and unlimited supply of “likes”. We
> already have decades old technologies like PGP which can prove the
> authenticity of a post. We already have distributed, peer-to-peer
> technologies allowing for censorship-proof, decentralised storage of data
> (such as WebTorrent used by PeerTube).
> 
> Unstoppable Domains looks okay on paper, but it’s a for-profit solution
> that isn’t really as decentralised as it pretends to be: you still have to
> go through UD to purchase domains. Moreover, getting around a DNS block is
> quite trivial, and “unstoppable” domains won’t solve the problem of a hard
> IP block by your IPS if used as a DNS provider.
> 
> Projects like the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) are interesting, and
> were already used to fight against censorship. However, the pricing model
> is slightly obfuscated, the cost of “pinning” (permanent storage) is a few
> times higher compared to regular storage solutions. If you’re using a
> company like Pinata to host (“pin”) your content and guarantee its
> permanence while you pay a monthly fee, you should start asking yourself
> how much decentralisation you are really left with if you still rely on
> your hosting provider and on the caching policy of independent nodes.
> Moreover, we already have magnet links, Tor Onion services and platforms
> like FreeNet, which is nearly 22 years old now (the web itself is only 9
> years older).
> 
> The technology is already here! We have had similar technologies for
> decades now! …and new technology is not what we need to fight the enormous
> power of the biggest platforms. That’s bullshit.
> 
> [snip]
> 
>